Five Heroes - Level Design
Process and Methodology
About Five Heroes
Five Heroes is a story-driven turn-based RPG. As a warlord, you recruit heroes, complete quests, progress through the storyline, defeat various enemies and bosses and upgrade your heroes.My Involvement
After planning the story campaigns, I broke them down into levels. I designed each level in the Unity engine, using custom editor tools developed by the programmers. When designing levels, I started with flow design elements, such as quest givers, objectives, trigger zones, and dynamic changes. Once the flow was ready, I moved on to environment design - map, terrain, atmosphere, foliage, props, effects.
The Pipeline
Whenever I approached the level design stage of production, I already had the story and the quests settled. I already knew how many levels there are going to be, what happens in each level, and how it moves the story forward.
Flow Design
The first step to designing a level is to design its flow. The flow consists of objectives, involved characters, interactions, enemies, and dialogue. In other words - who we need to speak to, what we need to do, and who we need to fight (if it's an important enemy or a boss). The goal of this first step is to have the entire flow of the level working on an empty map. Suppose we need to speak to a peasant, rescue his son from a bunch of skeletons, return to the peasant, and receive our reward. This is a simple example, but the complexity doesn't matter here. It just needs to work on the technical level.
Map/Setting Planning
The next step is to define to map and the setting - where it all happens. If we speak to a peasant, we need a village. If the skeletons kidnapped the peasants to the cemetery, we need a cemetery. If there is a lake we need to sail across, we need a lake and a ship to board. This step also requires an understanding of the level's difficulty. Is this a tutorial level, where we teach the player basic mechanics? Is it one of the story levels? Or is it a boss level that needs to be difficult? The broader context of this determines how far we want the player to go to rescue the peasants, and how many obstacles we need them to overcome. To map all of this, I usually begin with a sketch of the entire area on paper - this is where we start, this is our quest giver, this is our objective, this is where we encounter the enemies, etc.
Initial Implementation
After laying out the map on paper, I implement it in the engine. This is where I determine the approximate size of the map and its boundaries. Then, I place the key elements into their respective places according to the sketch - characters, objectives, enemies, etc. Once it's all ready, I have a playable map level with a functioning flow. It is important to mark the main paths we want players to follow. The "main road" needs to be intuitive and eventually lead to our objectives. There might be several paths, but if we want to encourage exploration, players need an indication when they are "on" a path or when they stray from it. So even before we delve into environment design, we need to determine our "main path."
Worldbuilding
The next step is worldbuilding. We have a playable map but it's still dry. This is where I define what else is on the map. What helps me here is the broader context of the entire story - what does this place mean for the story? What do we want the player to experience? Another thing that helps me is to tell the story of the place itself - who lives there? What do they do? What do they want? I use references from other games or real-life locations to make this place look unique and believable. My paradigm in this step is that the story of the game occurs WITHIN the story of the place. So it should NOT be too much connected to the main story. Rather, it needs to exist on its own. However, it also needs to serve the main story, not contradict it. So there is some balance to maintain. With that in mind, I design the environment.
Player's Experience
Once the map environment is ready, we have a playable level with all its visual story settled. Now it's time to populate it with gameplay-related stuff - enemies, rewards, secrets. Enemies are mainly on the main path. Secrets lie at the end of the paths that stray off the main one. When an environment is well designed, it would normally have those stray paths already. They are not necessarily "paths" per se, but could be backyards, forest hideouts, less crowded places in a village, or hermit huts. What's important is that it has to look natural and organic. When we have that, we could place the stronger enemies and the juicier rewards at the end of the secret paths, thus rewarding exploration.
Environment Fine-tuning
The next step is to flesh out the environment. Now that we have our environment, we need to make it more visually appealing. That includes more randomization in nature assets, and more props and foliage. Since, in Five Heroes, the map is a grid, I make sure to give offsets to certain assets to make it look less geometrical or more natural. Avoiding symmetry is also an important step of the process (unless symmetry is intended). Whatever type of environment I am building, I make sure it looks as believable as possible.
Life and Soul of the Level
The next step is to give more "life" to the map. It includes 3 layers - visual, narrative, and audio. Visual comes through animations - if there are NPCs, I give them something to do. If something happens in reaction to the player's actions, I give it VFX and animations. Audio comes through music and ambiance for the atmosphere. Sometimes, I play audio effects in reaction to the player's actions. The narrative layer in Five Heroes can be reflected through various interactions with NPCs or objects. These interactions are not mandatory but it's fun to play with. NPCs react with funny quips or complaints related to their everyday lives. It gives a broader perspective on the game's world and gives more "soul" to it.
Playtesting
The last step is, of course, playtesting. I need to test the following things - everything works as intended, the difficulty is balanced, the narrative pacing and beats serve the intended experience, the map has no holes, the flow has no bugs, the texts have no spelling errors, and finally, the level fulfills its purpose as a part of the story campaign. This might turn out to be the longest step in the process, depending on the number of iterations needed to achieve the desired results.
